How Learning NLP Can Benefit Your Family Life

How Learning NLP Can Benefit Your Family Life

While mastering Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) can be amazing for boosting your career, and especially your businesses if you are a coach or entrepreneur, there are more personal benefits from learning NLP as well.

NLP has the potential to greatly improve your relationships and family life by giving you access to better communication strategies, understanding how values and belief systems affect decision making, and giving you the ability to respond to situations without an influx of unwanted emotion.

Ready to be calm, in control and have absolute flexibility in family situations? Learning NLP can get you there.

Studying NLP is your gateway to more genuine and loving connections through improving communication, empathy and seeing the bigger picture.

While the benefits are multi-level, here are the top seven ways that learning NLP can benefit your family life and relationships.

  • Better Communication

The biggest part of NLP is communication. We are constantly communicating with the external world and internal map in our mind as well as the people around us. How we communicate affects our mood as well as our ability to make decisions and respond to our circumstances. What most people don’t know is that only a fraction of our communication is achieved using words (7%) the rest of our communication is made up in our physiology (55%) including how we hold ourselves and use body language and our tonality (38%).

Lack of communication, misunderstandings and jumping to conclusions (like mind-reading) are the biggest factors when it comes to arguments. Knowing how to read communication effectively and ask questions to bypass deletions, generalisations and distortions that naturally occur in our language can help get clarity on intentions, goals and meaning so you can stop mind-reading (which is 100% inaccurate) and really hear what someone is telling you. You are also going to know how to communicate with people better yourself and create connections and open communication channels, even in difficult situations using body language and rapport.

  • More Flexibility 

The person who has the greatest flexibility controls the system.

My favourite way to demonstrate flexibility is a little kid in the lolly aisle at the supermarket. The child will use every tool in their kit to get a lolly and show incredible flexibility as they work through their options. 

They will start by asking nicely. 

Parent says no. 

The child then changes tack and picks up the lolly they want.

Parent says no. 

The child might try to negate by swapping for a different lolly

Parent says no. 

The child gets mad and insists

Parent says no. 

The child cries

Parent says no. 

The child throws a tantrum. Child gets the lolly.

Some children will even escalate to tears then abruptly turn them off and go back to negotiating. The parent wants peace and wants to move forward and get through the store without embarrassment, this is not going to happen in this scenario of simply saying no. The child will simply keep going through options until they get what they want. To make this more even, the parent would need to show more flexibility than the child and finish with an outcome where you both of you get something.  

For that to happen you need to have a massive toolkit of positive and effective strategies to negotiate with.

As well as having a big toolkit of solutions to apply, NLP also offers flexible ways to apply them, meaning you can work them as needed to suit your current citation. These can include:

  • Building rapport
  • Chunking up or chunking down to match the other person’s point of view
  • Anchoring calm, patience and empathy to access in stressful times
  • Changing representational systems to be alignment with the other persons’ preferences
  • Aligning values so that you can see what the ultimate outcomes are
  • Understanding strategies to close the loop and guarantee satisfaction
  • Getting creative and finding ways to solve the solution outside of the normal responses
  • Asking questions in open ways
  • Avoiding combative behaviour through positive language phrasing such as agreement phrases and “if-then” phrases.

With a big toolkit, you get increased confidence and patience and find the calm that can stop difficult family situations from escalating. And of course, it’s not limited to toddlers, older adults can dig their heels in just as much, teenagers can seem impossible to negotiate with and when we are out of rapport with our partner, even a visit to the planet Jupiter isn’t far enough away from them.

Flexibility gives you the power to depressurize a situation and find a suitable win.

  • Taking Responsibility

When you take responsibility for your actions, emotions and responses you get instant control over what you do next. I break responsibility down to be your ABILITY to RESPOND. The opposite of this (where most people are every day) is swinging between being the victim and the aggressor.

A victim says that everything is happening to them, they are being unfairly treated and punished. Eventually, they will get fed up with feeling hurt and neglected and lash out at the people around them, becoming the aggressor themselves and causing hurt to feel in control and significant. This is a rapid cycle that can end marriages, with each partner feeling hurt by the other and doing small and biting things to get their own back. All of this is done passively and covertly and most people don’t even acknowledge their role, they are too caught up in justifying their behaviour as well as the anger and hurt they are feeling and amplifying it.

We have a choice over everything we do, including every emotion we feel. No one can make us feel something yet you hear this all the time with families, “He makes me feel so worthless”. No one can make you feel worthless, you are choosing to feel worthless. You can choose a different response whenever you like. Understanding this gives you the instant ability to choose your emotion and decide what to do next.

We always have a part to play in any situation, if we don’t and it’s truly out of our control, let it go, it’s none of our businesses. 

Choosing your emotional response gives you the greatest flexibility and allows you to stay calm and in control of your choices and outcomes.

  • Resilience

The ability to pick yourself up and try again comes down to mindset, nothing more. Looking for a different response, trying a new way and being patient with yourself through trial and error discoveries is something anyone can learn. 

If you give up at the first sign of a setback, chances are there’s a negative voice in your head telling you it was bound to fail, you never do anything right, that you failed and you are loser. 

None of this is true, but that doesn’t matter, if it’s the belief system you are running, you will believe it, regardless of any and all evidence that is available to override it.

Henry Ford famously said, “Whether you think you can, or whether you think you can’t, you’re right”.

How you think about a situation determines your results. If you are lined up to quit early on, you will never put in the work to see your goal through.

Most of these negative beliefs about yourself and how the world works are stored in the subconscious mind from your early childhood. As adults we can take another look at the situation and see a way through, because we have so much more understanding and ability than when we were six years old. To get to that point though we need to turn off the powerful, overriding autopilot that defaults to our six-year-old understanding and method for dealing with the world. It’s a really simple NLP technique to do and I teach it in my Excellence Now classes. We can easily and painlessly change our preexisting beliefs to open up more options and see new opportunities and pathways.

NLP is the key to achieving a resilient mindset.

  • Knowing It’s About Them, Not You

Have you ever told a friend or maybe your partner about a bad day you were having only to find them dismissive? “I bet your first thought was, why aren’t they supporting me?” Maybe you wondered if they were upset with you about something, maybe you got angry and thought they were being a bad friend in your time of need. Not very many people stop and think, “Are you okay?” Could it be they are having a rough day too and are lost in their own problems?

Here’s the thing, every single person thinks everything is about them, and in 99.9% of cases it’s got nothing to do with you, it’s about the other person. Understanding this is so liberating because you can stop trying to control stuff that’s not yours. You can start putting energy into you and your stuff and leave other people alone, or in this case, be supportive, open communication and give instead of taking.

It’s not personal. Your teenager biting your head off and arguing with you isn’t because they hate you, it’s about them and what they are feeling and what they need. Maybe they have opposite values to you and are not motivated to do what you are asking. 

When we can see that other people have their own needs, when we understand that values are really important to our decisions and choices and that all people have different values – even bigger than that, all values (however different) are right! We can let go of our side of the argument and cross over to see things from the other person’s perspective and offer understanding, empathy and patience.

  • Seeing The Reflection

You can also use NLP to find patterns in your triggers and get to the root cause of a problem. Usually, if something keeps coming up it’s not actually being caused by the other person, it’s an internal conflict. You are not seeing their behaviour as much as a mirror of something you dislike about yourself.

If something is really getting your goat, chances are your annoyance isn’t with the other person it’s with yourself. If someone drives you crazy because they don’t take responsibility for their finances, maybe you aren’t taking responsibility in your life in some way, maybe it’s not your finances, it might be your health or your career. Let’s say your partner drives you crazy because they won’t grow up, they are so immature, think about how you are about avoiding things like going to the dentist or paying bills, those are immature things too, perhaps you are immature and not acknowledging it or making changes it and it’s holding you back and driving you nuts inside.

When you notice yourself feeling that frustration, simply ask, “How is this a reflection?” That’s all it takes to open an internal search and understand your internal conflicts. From there you can decide to do something about it, or not, either way, the frustration will instantly stop and the war you are fighting inside yourself as well as with that other person will be over.

  • Know yourself better

A lot of family turmoil comes from not knowing what you want or how to get it. We can spend time looking to other people to fill our needs, placing undue responsibility on their shoulders and ours. Learning NLP helps you understand who you are on a deep and personal level so you can know what your true purpose and goals are and learn how you can put yourself in the driver’s seat to achieve your desires.

Once you make that inner connection other people can get to know you (and love you) so much more deeply. When you allow yourself love you receive and give so much more.

We often put up walls to protect ourselves but all they do is lock people out. Understanding where the walls came from and how you can protect yourself in more effective ways (through resilience, confidence, mindset and belief systems) can allow you to open up inside and out and experience more love, more joy and deep and lasting gratitude and create incredible and lasting connections.

My hands-on, in-personal NLP training course in Sydney is five days of practical and effective experience for an extensive understanding of NLP usages and tools to give you greater communication and connection in your relationships and family life. 

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